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OPM Director Asks Agencies to Examine How to Expedite Hiring By Stephen Barr Washington Post
August 15, 2003
Kay Coles James, the president's top adviser on the civil service, is again urging federal agencies to review their hiring operations and to adopt "whatever means necessary" to speed up their hiring process.
"After extensive research and analysis, it has become quite clear that issues related to the delays in the federal hiring process rest at the agency level," James said in a memo sent this week to the government's chief human capital officers, a management position recently established by Congress at more than two dozen agencies.
"It is within your authority to make the changes necessary to fairly and quickly hire job applicants," James, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, wrote the CHCOs. "Simply put, through aggressive leadership, the problems with federal hiring can be solved at the agency level."
In recent years, the government's hiring and recruitment procedures have been faulted as too complex and too slow. Too often, agencies lose top-notch job applicants to industry, consultants and nonprofits because they cannot turn around job offers fast enough.
The Merit Systems Protection Board, in a report this spring, said federal job announcements "are poorly written" and tend to be "legalistic, stilted and hard to follow." Far too often, the job postings are more likely to drive away applicants rather than attract them to federal service, MSPB found.
OPM, through a contract with Monster Government Solutions, revamped its Internet jobs site (www.usajobs.opm.gov) this month and plans to launch an enhanced version next month that will help the government move toward more standardized job announcements aimed at making it easier for job seekers to apply.
The revamped jobs site has drawn some criticism from federal employees. They said listings of Cabinet departments are incomplete, salary information is not quickly available and a new job-search function does not always turn up all the positions they are interested in.
OPM officials said they are moving to address such concerns, including improvements to the agency search function. They said the new system has been designed around models used in the private sector and has performed well. More than 1 million people visited the revamped job site in its first week, and its first day of operation saw a tenfold increase in the number of people coming to the site when compared to the old site a week earlier. Users posted more than 20,000 new resumes on the site during its first week of operation, OPM said.
In her memo, James reiterated her belief that agencies can speed up their hiring, especially of executives. On average, it takes the government about six months to hire an executive. But James told the CHCOs that she recently filled 14 "Senior Executive Service" positions at OPM in 49 days.
The new OPM executives were hired as part of a reorganization underway at OPM. Among those hired were Thomas Towberman, as director of the Federal Executive Institute; Robert Danbeck, as deputy associate director for the Center for Leadership Capacity Services; and Hughes Turner, as deputy associate director for the Center for Leadership and Executive Resources Policy.
Towberman previously served as a senior adviser at OPM, helping redesign the Presidential Management Intern program. Danbeck's most recent position was as vice president of human resources for IBM India Ltd.; he previously worked for IBM in China. Turner is the executive officer to the deputy commanding general for the Coalition Forces Land Component Command in Afghanistan and Kuwait. He will join OPM after retiring as an Army colonel and finishing up duties in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Retirements
Jeannette Barlow of the Justice Department's tax division will retire Sept. 3 after 35-plus years of service.
Gary Lippens, a supervisory information technology specialist at the Air Force Pentagon Communications Agency, will retire Aug. 31 after 30 years of Defense Department service.
Pat Morris retired July 31 from the Army Intelligence Civilian Personnel Advisory Center after more than 32 years of federal service.
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